Night 76
by brombones
Summary: Curt at night, alone.


A/n: I hate author's notes, so this one is going to be short. Haven't written anything in a while. Watched this movie a billion times, so I know I toyed with the 'time line' a bit. fin.

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He runs a hand through his hair. It's dark dark brown, dirty with the sweat of a few days, smells like smoke and weed.

He doesn't look but if he did, he would notice that his hair, dark dark brown, matches the color of the circles, lazy half-moon shapes, draped under his eyes. On him they look romantic. But they still hang in some places, or crawl up, morph into a blurry red where they creep past his eyelid, not from make-up or tiredness, but probably from drugs.

Disinterestedly, he wonders if he is blind, but then just realizes the light is off. He searches a minute for the switch, can't find it, slides his bony fingers, both arms, along the plaster, up and down, up and down, like the rubbing of a lover's flesh, because he's too tired to be angry, until he finds it.

He switches the light on, and even though it is only an old dim bulb, dangling from a lone cord, he cringes as the brightness seeps into the recesses of his brain, the dusty corridors and cobwebbed corners flinching from exposure to the hideous light, and he curls his lip, almost repulsed at himself.

He opens one eye, slow hands, black nail-polish chipped and dry, rub to make the blurriness go away, they water a bit, but it helps. He doesn't bother to register the reflection in the mirror. He is familiar with the blank face, the clammy skin, the chapped lips, the tired brow, but the eyes— he never looks at the eyes, he doesn't know what he would do if he looked at, and so acknowledged the reality of, the expression in those eyes.

A razor sits alone in the bathtub, the showerhead is rusty, but it's funny, he's thought, because he never takes showers. Baths, he likes to think, are reminders of mortality. He likes to think he's not immortal.

He no longer hears the creaking of the floorboards beneath him as he walks, but this doesn't strike him as strange, doesn't remind him to eat. It doesn't matter, and the multitude of waste piled up in both rooms of the little apartment is only from drinks, or sometimes syringes (always always empty), or ash from shared joints before a shared bed with meaningless partners.

It annoys him vaguely, as he searches the small sink top (his eyesight is blurry again), that the window near the couch is broken. It sometimes lets in lights, sounds of sirens, or people, or worst of all, music, at the most drug-addled moments, reminding him that there is a world around him, despite how much he refuses being part of it.

He finds what he is looking for. It is a bottle, the smell of the sloshing liquid inside makes his stomach turn, and he'd probably vomit if he could, his dark dark hair cutting across his eyes.

He can't really think straight, but he tries, and that's a lot lately, and pours the cold foul-smelling liquid into his hands. His first instinct is to swallow it, and the only reason he can think that he doesn't is that he is a coward, and then the vomit-reflex is back, and he starts to apply the mess into his hair.

The feeling of it burns his scalp, all his skin that's touched it, but he sort of enjoys the pain, and searches the discarded clothes on the ground desperately for a cigarette as he waits. It's not a cigarette he wants, but it will do, for a minute. He looks around, suddenly paranoid that someone will see him. Paranoia is the brother of sensory addiction, but in a minute he is fine again, it's only a quivering neurotic kind of clutch this time, and he's learned to embrace the anxiety by now.

The shaking, bitter, cold-claw scraping anxiety, that twists itself around his lungs and squeezes, trying to make each breath smaller and smaller. He doesn't mind it, because he's not stupid, and he recognizes anxiety isn't pain, just the fear of it.

He still feels like a fool, but as the carelessly applied liquid seeps down onto his face, and then he plunges his head into the sink to wash it away, holding his face in the crash-cold of the sink water a little longer than he had to, he feels better.

He looks back into the mirror— not the eyes, of course. But the hair, the dark dark brown is gone in most places. He had wanted it to be blonde, but it is more orangey, and he thinks somewhere in the back of his mind that he should have waited longer.

Though he doesn't care. The dark dark brown is bleached away, fried, burnt, faded. It makes him feel a little better.

Every time a piece of himself fades, he feels a little bit better. If he's not there anymore, they'll be no use in his memories, no point to his pain.

Brian used to run his hands through that dark dark hair.


End file.
